PAIN MANAGEMENT: PAIN RELIEF

The Science Behind Pain

First you have to understand pain, then you can learn how to treat pain and the best pain management mehods

The Science Behind PainFirst you have to understand pain, then you can learn how to treat pain and the best pain management mehods

James Archer / Anatomy Blue

Pain in the ass.
Painfully obvious.
Hurt feelings.
The truth hurts.

We have plenty of colorful phrases to describe emotional pain, but cutting-edge science has revealed we're just scratching the surface when it comes to explaining — not to mention treating — the physical kind of pain. A national survey found that 46 percent of women experienced pain every day, but only 39 percent felt they had any control over it. Pain, much like Andy Dick, has become an accepted nuisance.

When confronted with throbbing temples, crippling cramps, a locked-up lower back, or overworked abs, we usually stop what we're doing and pop some Advil or grab an ice pack. Which is exactly what that headache or wrenched back is telling us to do. "The purpose of pain is to grab your attention so that you'll fix the problem," says Scott M. Fishman, M.D., chief of the division of pain medicine at the University of California at Davis. It's the equivalent of turning the channel when you catch Andy Dick on a Celebrity Poker Showdown rerun.

The catch is that channel changing doesn't always work. Americans spend about $4 billion a year on over-the-counter pain-relief products, but 75 million of us still live with discomfort. And researchers have recently found that chronic pain can actually damage your brain, resulting in even more serious health problems.

Lucky for us, researchers are also making giant leaps in soothing ouches and easing agony — including new treatments designed for women. The emerging science about how we process and interpret pain signals has far-reaching implications for the diagnosis and management of everything from headaches to cancer. So before you swallow another aspirin or "just walk it off," learn what science is teaching us about how to handle our hurts.

Pain's Path

Until recently, what we knew about how the mind and body process pain was pretty straightforward. Think of your brain as a radio station that's usually tuned to Coldplay. Then you cut your thumb slicing a day-old bagel. The "station" switches to Linkin Park: Signals from nerve endings in your mangled thumb rush up to your thalamus, the part of the brain that decides what to do with pain signals (see graphic below). After interpreting the pulses as "pain!" the thalamus routes the signal to the brain regions that figure out how to react: the cerebral cortex, a thought center that assesses the damage and determines a course of action, and the limbic system, where emotional responses are processed. In nanoseconds, your brain determines how high to crank the volume on that new "song" so you can react appropriately — in this case, it sends you a speaker-shaking alert to drop the knife.